Sunday, May 27, 2007

Feuerbach’s Feeling

“Feeling is the organ of the divine”

“If feeling is the essential instrumentality or organ of religion, then God’ nature is nothing other than an expression of the nature of feeling. The divine essence, which is comprehended by feeling, is actually nothing other than the essence of feeling, enraptured and delighted with itself—nothing but self-intoxicated, self contented feeling.”

Consciousness of God is human self consciousness; knowledge of God is human self knowledge. By the God you know the human, and conversely by the human, you know the God. The two are one. What God is to a person that too is the spirit, the soul; and what the spirit, the soul are to a person, that is the God. God is the revealed and explicit inner self of a human being…The historical progress of religion consists therefore in this: that what an earlier religion took to be objective, is later recognized to be something human. What was earlier religion is later taken to be idolatry: humans are seen to have adored their own nature. Humans objectified themselves but failed to recognize themselves as this object. The later religion takes this step; every advance in religion is therefore a deepening in self knowledge.

Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity

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God created man, man created God—mirror image. One may disagree with what old Ludwig Feuerbach is saying but nothing could be a better proof for the existence of God than his thesis. Knowledge of the self is knowledge of God. I don’t know what feeling here is, but it’s true that what is important is that one has a feeling of or for God because then one can say there is God. But, as the death of theology people say, what if the feeling is gone? Does it matter whether there is God if there is no feeling of God? Of course this is not possible because the negation of a feeling of something must necessitate the existence of something that one has to negate his feeling about. I don’t know, but Anselm’s ontological proof is difficult to refute.